Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday May 14, 2012 @11:05AM
from the open-up dept.

aesoteric writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has voiced a renewed desire to see the company open its architecture to the masses, allowing savvy users to expand and add to their products at will. However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves. He also sees any change of heart on openness as a challenge when Apple continues to rake in huge cash with its current model."

Unfortunately, part of the effect of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field was to basically write Woz out of Apple history almost completely. If you listen to manyApple employees and fans, you would think that Jobs created Apple single-handedly, perhaps with divine powers. There is very little respect (or even acknowledgement) at Apple for Woz or his contributions in the early days. In fact, very little respect is afforded there to the engineering of Apple products in general, versus their design and marketing. So, though it would be nice to think that Woz's voice might have some impact on Apple, he's probably even less likely to be listened to at Apple HQ than some random man-on-the-street.

Woz's story makes a lot of Apple die-hards very uncomfortable (particularly the bits about Jobs screwing him over). And the standard response seems to be just pretending that he doesn't exist, and ignoring him. It's sad and unfair. But that's the way it is.

While Woz was certainly not the recipient of terribly fair treatment, I suspect that there is a second reason why he was removed from the picture comparatively early:

The success of the early Apple designs (the II particularly) rested in no small part on assorted deep-hack chip count and cost reduction measures, the sort of thing that Woz is reputed to be very good indeed at. It did lead to somewhat arcane and tightly interlinked designs; but this was back when reducing the chip count in your floppy drive was still Serious Savings or having Woz go up the mountain and descend bearing the design for ADB made your peripheral interconnects genuinely better than the other guy's. In Apple's later models, they just kept moving closer and closer to commodity circuits wrapped in nice industrial design and a friendly software layer.

Obviously, somebody still has to design their logic boards; but that hasn't really been Apple's competitive edge in ages. Jobs occupied a larger-than-life seat on the pantheon; but the members immediately behind him in public awareness and clout were the industrial design guru and the supply chain/manufacturing guy. Board-level engineering elegance appears to have been swamped by volume savings on commodity silicon some time ago.

Apple really spawned twice. The first incarnation had Woz's help and indeed he helped to establish the brand.The second incarnation was all Jobs.But to say engineering is not their competitive edge ignores that, like that famous political cry, "It's the system, stupid" that makes Apple soar. Ergonomic design is pushing the envelope, hardware design is constantly improving, and software is written to be easily accessible and controllable, and the Apple now controls the supply chain rather than the other

A third reason is that he had a plane crash in 1981 which caused him to take a leave of absence. From what I read, it left some lasting, bad damage including memory loss [pcmag.com]. Between all that and being set for life, economically, he didn't have to go back.

Wow, I've read many accounts of Apple's founding and Woz is always prominent, we've all read fanboys but I've never seen one claim Woz didn't contribute, I've never seen anyone minimize his contribution and I've never read any equivocation on his treatment at the hands of Jobs. You sir have erected a straw man; I think you'd be challenged to find a single link or quote from Jobs himself along these lines.

There is the simple fact that he left, and that he, by his own admission, had no idea how to make money off his inventions, and would have been happy working the day shift at HP and make a little money running Apple as a mail-order schematic business. To say that he was an engineers genius and critical to Apple's first success is true, but it's also true he had no idea of the potential for the business, he was by all accounts an awful salesman, and at the time he really didn't have any ambition beyond building a slightly cooler IMSAI clone.

Indeed. Job's contribution to Apple was a corporate mindset, marketing, and ultimately the selfish controlling "closed" nature of every product it brought to market. The difference between the two men can be distilled down to one crucial personality trait: respect. Wozniak has respect for Apple's customers that Jobs never did. Jobs treated Apple customers like cattle, to be guided through narrow constricting chutes and confined in little cages, all while milking them of every last ounce.

Jobs treated Apple customers like cattle, to be guided through narrow constricting chutes and confined in little cages, all while milking them of every last ounce.

I think it's hysterical that you think no one who uses Apple products is bright enough to make an informed decision about them. Do you really think there are no Apple users who aren't acutely aware of the alternative products available to them? Seriously? You think no one has heard of Windows or Linux or Kindle or Android? No one is trapped by Apple.

People use Apple products because they want to, not because they have to. Almost no one actually requires a Mac and the majority of computers sold are made by other vendors. You can do virtually all the same tasks perfectly well on a Windows and/or Linux machine. There are respectable quality competing products for the iPod, iPhone and iPad, widely available to anyone who wants them, often at lower price points and sometimes with features missing from Apple products or with compelling design features of their own. And yet millions still buy Apple products and have for many years now. This does not happen by accident or by marketing and Apple certainly does not (even today) have the market power to force people into buying their products.

(And before anyone starts, Apple customers are not mostly status seeking hipsters either. Nobody sells that many units over that many years on image alone. If the products sucked they wouldn't sell for long no matter how good a salesman Steve Jobs was.)

I think it's hysterical that you so completely misinterpreted my last sentence and then ran off on a long-winded rant about your distortion. You're quite correct that Apple doesn't force anyone to BUY its products. The force is applied before and after the sale, beforehand in deliberately limiting design and implementation, and afterward in lawsuits and other threats to enforce those limitations. My comments suggested psychology behind "open" versus "closed" and how the attitudes of Wozniak and Jobs refl

I think that happens a lot. It happened to me. I co-founded an imaging company back in 1983 based on my idea for connecting a high speed CCD camera to an advanced workstation - bleeding edge stuff at the time. A few months later the company was already doing well, and my associate (a sales guy) and I brought in a new CEO who brought some VC money with him. I left in frustration three years later as the CEO was mismanaging the place horribly, although he did mange to keep bringing new investment money into the company. The history of the company as of a year or two after that was how the CEO had taken an interesting project by a couple of engineers and single-handedly created a company to bring it to fruition - literally our efforts merited part of a single sentence in a ten page history.

The last laugh was that after I left (I had been VP of R&D), in the next two years they went through seven VPs of R&D (I guess I wasn't doing such a bad job!), and spent most of the 1990s fighting a series of battles against financial types who were trying to force them into bankruptcy - people that the CEO had originally brought in to invest in the company. The financial shenanigans were rather distressing to me. In a short conversation about 1999, the CEO of the then-defunct company agreed that the three major things I had recommended, and he had rejected finally triggering me to quit, were all correct - but as he said, "I hadn't been forceful enough to convince him!" - sigh. And he spent ten years fighting in court instead of doing other fun things.

I still feel there was a good legacy. My track record in managing the engineering side was that we were technically successful on every project, usually under budget, and had excellent morale. I'm still friends with folks that I originally hired there. And we did some really great work in vectorizing, OCR and entity recognition for large format maps and drawings. We even did some work on constructing 3D models from sets of 2D drawings. We could generate terrain models from USGS maps. I got to tour the Space Shuttle External Tank manufacturing facility, and we built image processors that were two orders of magnitude faster than anything else out there, using chips from the cruise missile program (credit where credit is due - that hardware and a lot of the original code behind the OCR and other recognition capability was done by the Visual Understanding Lab of Bob Thibadeau, research professor at Carnegie Mellon). Of course, all that can now be done by any common desktop in software.

Problem is that Apple floundered under Sculley and his successors before Jobs returned to the company. And they did try opening up the Power Mac architecture along w/ IBM, and you had companies like Power Computing, Motorola and Umax take a stab at making macs. Only problem is that by this was that by this time, the RISC challenges to Wintel that were supposed to happen had all sputtered - NT on RISC was going nowhere, IBM failed to come up w/ Workplace OS or OS/2 for PPC, Pink - the OS from that Apple su

There were obvious issues with the company before Jobs came back. The lack of a decent OS (which Apple bought from Jobs), a bad series of high level executives that didn't know how to focus the company (not that another would not have done so and to say otherwise is to preach Apple's future doom) hurt Apple's future potential. Job's simply refocused on specific efforts, he got Gates to loan some money and continue to commit software development efforts, and brought his OS with him. This didn't happen overnight. It took years while building the right management team. Chrysler had the same resurgence with Lee Iacocca. And if it hadn't been for the rest of the industry turning down the developer of the iPod Apple would not be where they are today. So, hard work, a refocus, a new OS, a loan from Gates, and the serendipity of matching the iPod with a new 1.5" drive gave Apple it's resurgence. Jobs played a big part as a leader and was tremendously successful at redirecting the company focusing on products that were bound to benefit Apple (I'm sure there were many projects that were also of great potential that were killed). He was not a guru and through his ill temper and manipulation did he get people to serve him.

So, give him credit, but realize that there's a bit of distorted reality in how some here present what Job's did.

Without Woz, Jobs would have been nothing and Apple would have been a failure. Jobs isn't a god, of course he was an innovator, maybe a genius, but everyone makes you believe that Jobs came up with EVERYTHING, the User Interface, Design, EVERYTHING. This isn't the case, even Jobs admitted it, he said "It's the talented people at Apple that make the difference" or something like that.

Jobs created first, a market segment, and that was "A PC for the rest of us". (Not to mention really swallowing up the mp3 player market with their device, and now pretty much owning music distribution.)

I don't think Apple meant to take over the PC/mobile computing industries. It just turned out that most people were ready for something that will get out of their way and "just work". They were more successful than they ever would have imagined, by producing devices that just work and let people use computers/tablets for what they want without having to spend so much time on it.

There's nothing wrong with this. If you don't like Apple's ecosystem, you can go the Windows our Linux route. They just found a niche that didn't turn out to be a niche.

Jobs' innovation was trying to keep things as simple as possible. Go read up on the dev meetings regarding the Itunes Burn Cd functionality and how Steve came in and simplified the whole thing. Steve was a master at KISS.

This. While I do think Jobs is overrated, he's had one valuable contribution to the industry. Most other companies were content if their product worked, even if it shipped with a 300 page manual. Jobs was obsessed with making his products simple and easy to use, almost to a fault (e.g. only one button on the mouse).

IMHO it's this ease of use which is primarily responsible for Apple's success today. Regular people view computers as complicated, and computer geeks (e.g. the Linux community) as obsessed with that complexity. Apple has established a reputation for making computers easy to use, so they're the first (and often only) product people look at when buying a computing device, even if it costs more.

Besides: does this "ease of use" explain why I had to enter in fucking arcane escape sequences into the configs to make the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys on my keyboard work?

Since I have no idea what you're referring to as all the keys work out-of-the-box on my MacBook, I'm betting that you hit the "Linux User On A Mac" trap. You try to do something and it doesn't work as expected, so you reflexively Google for a solution and find a forum post for 2005 that kind of half-assed patches around the problem. Almost every time that's happened to me (as a Linux User On A Mac), I've later discovered that 1) there was another "native" way to do it with a couple of mouse clicks that were completely obvious in retrospect, or 2) I was trying to inflict a much more complicated workflow onto something much easier to use once I quit fighting it.

As far as I know, all Macs come with working movement keys. I hate to say this, but I think you were just using it wrong.

The issue the parent had is that certain keys on the keyboard behave different from how UNIX and Windows traditionally handle them. For instance, PgUp and PgDown only scroll the viewport. They do not move the cursor. The fun is when you're very used to the cursor moving and then press one of the directional arrows to find you're back in the original position. You have to remember to click the mouse in the document to re-set the cursor position. Likewise, Home and End move the viewport to the very top and bottom of the viewport, not the expected beginning and ending of the line, if you're in a multi-line textbox.

So, while the keys do work, they are quite different from other OSes out there, leading to some very annoying behavior if you're keyboard-centric.

Regular people view computers as complicated, and computer geeks (e.g. the Linux community) as obsessed with that complexity.

No. Mac OS X, Windows and the Linux environments that try to imitate them are complex. The Linux base, as UNIX, is very simple. And the proof is that is hard to learn. Making a "idiot friendly UI" requires an immense amount of complexity.

Jobs was a perfectionist and one that just happened to know what people wanted. He had his misses (the Cube) but rumor had it that the iPhone wasn't going public until it was 'perfect'. It just wasn't the big things, it was the small stuff like how a font looked in WYSIWYG or even rectangles with rounded corners [folklore.org].

Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. "Well, circles and ovals are goo

Woz is the true and only founder of Apple. He single handedly enabled them, he alone made Apple 1 computer in his garage. He started it all, if it was not for Woz and his early efforts, Jobs would be selling used cars or something...

Therefore Woz >> Jobs.

Also it is well known fact that Jobs just copied Sony, after Apple nearly exited the market at around 1998, Jobs in desperation copied Sony products (Sony was totaly dominating the market at the time), from Apple Pippin (PlayStation), iPod (Walkman)

Jobs was obsessed with brands. He wanted to make a brand. He was obsessed with the look of certain products. He simply followed what others had done. This doesn't mean that's bad. It's good. But let's put his quality efforts into perspective.

Interestingly enough, Apple's people came away from their quick tour through PARC thinking that Xerox's interface did things that it didn't actually do. For example, Xerox's interface didn't allow programs to draw into a portion of a window that was obscured, and didn't have self-repairing windows -- when you dragged one window off of another, you had to click the revealed window to get it to repaint. Apple's people didn't realize that Xerox's system didn't allow those things, and thus, designed QuickDraw and the Lisa/Mac Window Manager so they *did* allow those.

Another example is drag-and-drop file management. It seems like such an obvious thing with icons for files and a mouse, but Xerox's interface didn't have it. Apple's people invented it on their own for the Lisa/Mac interface. Some other things that the Lisa/Mac interface did that Xerox's didn't:

* "Direct manipulation" of file/folder/etc. names (i.e., click on the name and type to edit it)

The chances of Jobs finding someone else of Woz's caliber, who would also put up with him, are probably not very good. Could he have found someone else to fill the roll of Woz? Definitely. I doubt the person would have been nearly as good.

As far as you are concerned, and reality, not necessarily the same thing.

Are any of pylons and struts on the top floor of a skyscraper the same exact ones as on the bottom (not identical, same)? Does that make the bottom irellevant? If Apple hadn't gotten off the ground, it wouldn't be here today. Apple now is NOT next, but a combination of the old Apple, and NeXT, both are extremely important to what it is today.

I maintain that Apple very likely would not be what it is today, without Woz.

As far as you are concerned, and reality, not necessarily the same thing.

Are any of pylons and struts on the top floor of a skyscraper the same exact ones as on the bottom (not identical, same)? Does that make the bottom irellevant? If Apple hadn't gotten off the ground, it wouldn't be here today. Apple now is NOT next, but a combination of the old Apple, and NeXT, both are extremely important to what it is today.

I maintain that Apple very likely would not be what it is today, without Woz.

Having worked at both NeXT and Apple I can honestly say you are FULL OF SHIT. Without NeXT Apple closes its doors 15 months after the merger. After Steve was brought back as iCEO we had 3 months of working capital left. We canceled the Sabbatical Program which had 1/3rd of the entire staff holding 12 weeks of paid vacation. Steve told them ``there is the door, don't let it hit you in the ass on your way out.'' And some arrogant developers left. He canceled the Fellow Program as well. Brilliant moves. Either

Jobs supporters say "Without Jobs, you wouldn't have been able to sell it."

Everybody needs to remember it takes a team where the members complement each other. Woz and Jobs would have sucked individually, but together they made Apple great. Jobs and Raskin made Apple great in the Mac. In modern days it was Jobs, Ive and Cook. And through most of the early history there was Tog, setting the standard for usability. If you want to talk about an Apple hero most people don't know about, look at the Tog.

Do not down play Woz's contribution to Apple. One of the major reasons for the success of the Macintosh was the IWM chip that was the heart of it This amazing hardware hack coupled complex state machine logic and individual circuits together in one chip to become greater than the sum of its parts. Woz's design used the partial circuits in a dozen or more different ways, reconfiguring itself on the fly to do what needed to be done at that point. Could another engineer have done this design and made it work so well? Perhaps, but, I doubt it. "IWM" stands for "Integrated Woz Machine", and well it should. It remains a pretty spiffy hack,
pleasant dreams
bee man dave

He gave up a lot of his wealth, and even potential wealth to spend more time doing things he thought were more rewarding in other ways. So when he asks people to give up their share of the pie it's not a do as I say not as I do thing.

Steve Jobs ACTIVELY screwed him on a business deal in the VERY early days of Apple. Jobs said they got paid X for a job they were to split the fee on, but really they got X + Y. Steve kept his half of X and all of Y.

It was when Atari was making a home version of Breakout and Jobs oversold his ability to create the product. Atari offered Jobs $750, plus a bonus for each chip Jobs could eliminate from the cartridge (by efficient programming). Jobs turn to Woz and told him they'd split the fee. Woz stayed up four nights programming breakout and did such an awesome job that Atari ended up paying Jobs $5,000. He paid Woz his $375 and kept the rest.

Speaking of Atari, history could have been much different because around 1980 they really the best micro computer but the marketing was terrible. Later when Jack Tramiel took over what was left then all of the smart Atari guys went on to do the Amiga. Jobs has to be considered one heck of a salesman and a little bit of a crook as you just said.

I'm not too worried about the WOZ because he has enough money to play with whatever he wants for the rest of his life even so.

That's because you misjudge what people mean by "design" -- Apple's goal is to make products that make you say "wow" rather than (necessarily) products that stay with in spec and achieve six nines of uptime, keep working after you accidentally sit on them, or never break or spontaneously combust in normal usage. And it's pretty much always been that way. The failure rate of the power supplies in "mirror door" PowerMac G4s was something preposterous like 50%, but they sure were pretty.

I think you're in an inverse reality distortion field there. I know many photography and video professionals who take their MacBooks with them wherever they go, edit in the field, have taken them round the world etc. etc., and have nothing but good things to say about Apple. It's true that they've had their fair share of issues, but part of it is the very narrow range of products they have on the market at any one time (compared to say Dell, HP and Lenovo) - usually they only have one product hitting a pa

I suppose the notion of Apple becoming more open to modifiers, tinkerers, hardware/software enthusiasts, and lowly programmers would be akin to Gillette giving away the plans and patents to its razor cartridges.

It is hard to tell the guy backing up the dump trucks full of cash into his drive way that he's doing it wrong. If you're ideas are better, why aren't you backing the dump trucks of cash up into your driveway.

I understand that is the conventional wisdom; anyone who questions that is generally viewed as some kind of heretic, hippy, or anarchist.

Question the premise and you allow points of view like Woz's, or Stallman's, or anyone who argues for more social responsibility and ecological awareness. But demand that every answer results in "MAKE MOAR MONEYS" and we wind up with shiny traps, tragically-abused commons, and proprietary ownership of almost anything that was once public domain.

"However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves"

The moment it is opened to others it will turn into the same mess that Windows has. Keeping the hardware closed makes development & support manageable.
There's a reason nobody listens. This idea is dumb.

Opening the hardware is one thing, but Woz was also talking about software. Allowing more third-party access to Apple's "calendar world, their contact world" would hardly increase support complexity, but it would sure make it harder to leave the Apple ecosystem.

No, I meant "don't let people be assholes and install whatever they want or modify their hardware however they like." Or maybe "Let them, but instantly void their warranty. Don't put up with that shit."
Apple has no interest in adding iOS to other devices unless they design said devices. Goes right back to the manageable support issue.

The moment it is opened to others it will turn into the same mess that Windows has.

The Windows mess has little to do with hardware variability, and everything with poor design and poor implementation. And that's a result of how Microsoft is a bunch of competing internal fiefdoms, all of which are looking out for their own best interest, rather than a great user experience (a Microsoft breakup would have been the best thing that could have happened to them).

Apple is NOT a software company! Apple tried this once before and nearly destroyed themselves.
Personally I believe one of the main reasons that Apple stuff (mostly) works as advertized is because they don't have to deal with 1000 different video cards, 50 different sound cards, 100 different motherboards... Etc.

I disagree. Yes, there are tensions between openness/hackability/configurability/variability and stability/manageability/simplicity. However, the existence of certain tradeoffs doesn't mean that Apple couldn't make a more open product in some ways without hampering their much-vaunted quality.

One way to think about this question to analyze whether a given open/non-open decision is motivated by quality or by money. A great many of the design decisions that are being made are not in the pursuit of a perfect

It didn't work out well then because the Mac was Apple's primary source of revenue. Not so anymore.

Specifically, what happened back then was that the cloners were supposed to take the low end of the market that Apple didn't want. Instead, at least one of them went balls-to-the-wall and made some machines that were faster than Apple's fastest. They began to hit Apple right in the bottom line, which is why almost immediately upon his return Jobs used a contract loophole to kill the clone program.

Personally, I would love to see Apple open up for at least some things. I can understand to a degree that they don't want consumers running OS X on non-Apple hardware, but since they don't sell enterprise-class servers anymore I think they should officially allow, certify, and fully support installation and virtualization of OS X Server on at least a limited selection of non-Apple hardware.

I think this will happen, further down the line. I think they will eventually release a 'server only' OSX that doesn't come with iLife and costs in the medium hundreds, so that there's little advantage to buying a third party machine for personal and small business use (because of the cost of the software) whilst encouraging medium-size audio, photography and video businesses to stick with Apple/OSX/iOS as a platform.

It is a matter of what is best for the rest of society. Computers are basically the most important communication tool in industrialized nations, and we have every right to expect that our computers will do what we want them to do -- without first having to ask permission from the person who made the computer. Apple has already shown that they are willing to use their power over the app store to engage in political censorship. How can we have a free society if our ability to communicate can be hampered?

I'm sure he's always open to another round of Segway polo, or buying a new cell phone to add to his collection, or hanging out with school kids and doing his best attempt at an inspiring lecture (he's not great at it, but everybody loves him anyway because he is a permanent duke of geekdom), or maybe just going home and rolling around in a big pile of cash.

And that's pretty much the problem. As much as I hate it and as much as I think it's terribly, terribly wrong, what made Apple big is marketing, not engineering. And that's not trying to bash Apple, it's what you can easily see when you follow Apple's history. It was a niche product while they relied on engineering. It was a great product, well engineered, with a lot of technical innovations. As soon as they moved towards design and gadgets, in other words, as soon as they went for flashy and gimmicky instead of technical innovation, people started flocking to them.

Woz, as much as I agree with you, I'd sad to say that this would be a bad move for Apple. It would certainly endear Apple again to engineers, but financially it would not be beneficial.

I disagree. The original iPod was an engineering feat. I know all the technology was already available, but that's the point of engineering - to do something clever and slick that works really, really well, by seeing and understanding what other people have missed. Same for the original iMac - it was a design and engineering triumph, totally iconic. The marketing was there too, but both are needed. See the Commodore Amiga for an example of great engineering and crummy marketing - and also the desire to maintain backwards compatibility holding back what could have been an amazing line of computers.

The slashdot crowd doesn't understand that and thus they don't understand why Apple is so successful. The "marketing" crap is your best attempt to rationalize Apple's success without having to expand your tiny little world.

Meanwhile, Apple is on their way to being the first $1 trillion company because nearly everyone else in the world understands something that you don't: "The ONLY point of technology is to make life easier for humans"--by that definition, Apple cranks out the best technology using the best engineering. Deal with it.

The slashdot crowd doesn't understand that and thus they don't understand why Apple is so successful. The "marketing" crap is your best attempt to rationalize Apple's success without having to expand your tiny little world.

Meanwhile, Apple is on their way to being the first $1 trillion company because nearly everyone else in the world understands something that you don't: "The ONLY point of technology is to make life easier for humans"--by that definition, Apple cranks out the best technology using the best engineering. Deal with it.

Your expert analysis fails to account for the continued existence of Microsoft, Android and pretty much every non-Apple technology. Could it be that you think "nearly everyone else in the world" means "everyone who agrees with me"?

Unix is an operating system, made by engineers for engineers. It came about before Apple, and rose to great heights without Apple, and now Apple has adopted it as their platform. I firmly believe it will be around long after Apple.

You need a marketing genius to make a wildly successful business. You need a remarkable group of engineers to create enduring technology. I know which one I value more, do you?

(Unix has its faults, it's not perfect. But I think we can agree that it has proven to be a pretty useful

and forego the billions of dollars it makes by having closed systems. I'm not a fan of apple, but as a business, keeping your products so tightly intertwined is the best thing you can do to continually sell products and accessories.

If you go to an open architecture, the only way you make money is from licensing, and manufactures in china will completely ignore this and screw you over.

There is a company that does that has been doing this very well for decades, Microsoft any one?

Heh, one could point the the utter failure of the "Us" festival in the 80's, I think he get's a lifetime "titanhood" pass if you look at the sheer # of problems he had to solve to make the Apple 1 & 2 work:...an expansion bus and it's own (open) electrical and logical specification...affordable 5.25" disk i/o (this alone would be a single major accomplishment for one hacker)...his creative use of banked video memory to display high resolutions (280x192 was considered hi-res back then)...and an F'ing

Mr. Wozniak didn't betray Apple. Apple was growing in a different direction than the kind of environment where he was continuing to feel useful. His options of remaining with Apple were apparently to either continue being an engineer at Apple where he didn't feel he was contributing much, since Apple had well over a hundred engineeers at that point, or to move into a management position, but he did not want to move into management because he liked being

Where is this criticism for Woz? I haven't been on slashdot as long as some but haven't really run across anyone dissing him. If anything, people still hold him up for his cool tech tricks he used in Apple/AppleII.

I could imagine an Apple under Woz turning out much the same way as the Bell Labs story: Lots of world-changing technology, very little profit.

Jobs and Woz needed each other to make Apple a reality. Jobs needed Woz to have really cool products to sell early on - without Woz, he either would have ended up yet another commune-dwelling hippie, or maybe yet another marketing jerk in a suit (like That Guy [theinfosphere.org] in Futurama). Woz needed Jobs to go independent and sell his stuff on a mass scale - without Jobs, he'd probably be happily designing stuff for HP or some other big firm and playing with hardware tinkering and open-source software in his spare time.

I wish I had mod points, but you obviously don't need them. There is the phrase "It takes two to tango" and Woz/Jobs combo danced a nice dance, a beautiful masterpiece called Apple Computers. to me, people who hold Jobs up over Woz or visa versa aren't capable of seeing the whole picture.

Was Jobs a jerk? Probably. Is Woz a nice geek? Probably. Personalities being what they are, it often takes a balanced mix of personalities to get things done. Not everyone can be a General, we need privates too. What Jobs p

Where is that? We have a free/libre operating system that is useful and secure, which supports modern features and which is widely used. GNU/Linux showed the world that you can have a good operating system without proprietary licensing.

OSX is the best OS out there today with no doubt

I will raise some doubts about that. I need an OS that is not going to try to thwart me when I debug programs:

The issue is hardware support. If you buy a Mac, Apple has made sure the hardware works with their drivers. Machines sold with Windows usually work well because either Microsoft or the manufacturer has made sure the drivers and hardware are compatible. If you installing an OS on a machine which was sold with a different OS, you can never expect the same level of hardware compatibility. Try installing OSX on a machine sold with Windows. Installing Windows on most Macs today will work, but some of the devices